Col. Samuel Thomas, a Freedmen's
Bureau official, describes the attitude of ex-Confederates
toward the former slaves.

Wherever I go- - the street, the shop, the house,
or the steamboat- - I hear the people talk in such a way as
to indicate that they are yet unable to conceive of the
Negro as possessing any rights at all. Men who are honorable
in their dealings with their white neighbors will cheat a
Negro without feeling a single twinge of their honor. To
kill a Negro they do not deem murder; to debauch a Negro
woman they do not think fornication; to take the property
away from a Negro they do not consider robbery. The people
boast that when they get freedmen affairs in their own
hands, to use their own classic expression, "the niggers
will catch hell."

The reason of all this is simple and manifest. The whites
esteem the blacks their property by natural right, and
however much they may admit that the individual relations of
masters and slaves have been destroyed by the war and the
President's emancipation proclamation, they still have an
ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the
whites at large, and whenever opportunity serves they treat
the colored people just as their profit, caprice or passion
may dictate.